November 28, 2012

Telepath Tactics Kickstarter campaign is go!

Telepath Tactics has a new thing going for it, folks! It starts with a ‘K’ and ends with an ‘ickstarter,’ and it’s going to let me make this game everything that it can be. I am, of course, talking about

“Okay,” you say, “the game looks fantastic, but why Kickstarter?” It’s pretty simple. When I first began working on Telepath Tactics, it was to be a short project, a quick and relaxing interlude after the four-year ordeal of developing Telepath RPG: Servants of God. However, the game has since grown from a simple multiplayer tactics game to include a story-heavy single player campaign and extensive mod support.

Self-funding Telepath Tactics’ development has been adequate until now because it was just multiplayer. I needed relatively few assets for that: 22 character classes, a few dozens destructible objects, and a small handful of tilesets.

However, now that Telepath Tactics has a single player campaign, day and night, weather effects, and support for player-created campaigns, we need more content. We need extra character sprites: male and female variants for each character class, for one thing. NPC sprites are important to have as well. We need tilesets that portray a wider variety of locales, and destructible objects to match. We need original sound effects; we need character portraits; we need art for the user interface; we need a full soundtrack. Et cetera!

All of that stuff is awesome, but it takes money: specifically, $23,000. I don’t have $23,000 just lying around to spend, unfortunately, so the next best option is to run a Kickstarter. And so that is exactly what I am doing.